Eighth blackbird Returns to CCM
Though they belong to the world now, the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music can still rightly consider eighth blackbird one of its own.
Members of the Grammy-winning contemporary music sextet, who used to sit cross-legged on the floor of CCM professor Joel Hoffman's office and study scores for performance on Hoffman's innovative "Music X" series, earned their graduate degrees in chamber music at CCM, and were in residence at the school for three years.
The ensemble remains a regular participant in "Music X," which has now re-located to Switzerland after being canceled by CCM in 2008 in response to budgetary woes. They have many friends in Cincinnati and CCM's Corbett Auditorium was nearly full for their concert Tuesday evening (January 12) for Chamber Music Cincinnati.
Eighth blackbird -- Tim Munro, flutes; Michael Maccaferri, clarinets; Matt Albert, violin and viola; Nicholas Photinos, cello; Matthew Duvall, percussion; and Lisa Kaplan, piano, all original members except Munro -- was in the vanguard of the sea change now taking place in "classical" music. They perform only new and contemporary music and incorporate all of the streams now flowing into the art form from popular and world music, multi-media and so on.
They brought examples with them by Steve Reich, Missy Mazzoli, George Perle, Thomas Ades and Stephen Hartke, all but the Ades commissioned by or for eighth blackbird. The crowd, which included listeners of all ages, loved it, demonstrating the vitality and "unstuffy-ness" of the chamber music idiom.
Casually attired -- shirt sleeves and trousers for the men, Lisa Kaplan's short dress and black boots being the only thing approaching "dressed up" -- the musicians took turns introducing the music on the program. It made for the kind of intimate, up-close experience much to be desired in the concert hall today.
Opening work was "Still Life with Avalanche" (2008) by New Yorker Missy Mazzoli, a self-described "indie classical" composer who still loves triads (as she told online interviewer Hilary Hahn). It begins serenely enough with "a pile of melodies" (Mazzoli) before turning agitated with hard strokes on tenor drum and dissolution into chaos. According to Mazzoli's program note, she was writing it when she learned about a death in her family.
This was followed by George Perle's "Critical Moments 2" (2001), a work that harks back to the 20th-century Second Viennese School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern). It is a set of nine, aphoristic movements (the shortest is 44 seconds), each conveying a satisfying sense of structure. It is delicate, colorful music: slow, with dark timbres in numbers III and VIII (bass clarinet, alto flute), light and frisky in V (clarinet and cello played with the stick of the bow), slow and reflective with a surprise ending in IV (a big tam-tam blow), wood percussion in VII, and finally, what sounded like a popped balloon in IX, with cello "snap" pizzicato followed by airy filigrees passed through the ensemble to a quiet end. Astonishingly, this was all played from memory by eighth blackbird.
British composer Thomas Ades' "Catch" (1991) brought the element of theater to the program. His title refers to the children's game "pig in the middle" where players in a circle try to throw a ball to each other without it being caught by the player in the center. It unfolds like a mini-tone poem. Following Ades' instructions, clarinetist Maccaferri (heard offstage at first) walked on and crept into the center of the ensemble as it played tranquil music. There he sounded the familiar, five-note children's taunt (NA, na, na, NA, na) before "escaping" and running offstage again. The music continued softly after that, breaking into a little jig at one point with Photinos gleefully plucking the strings behind the bridge of his cello.
Alas, it was not over. Maccaferri suddenly reappeared stage left, arousing "screams" by the other instruments and what sounded like a threnody that turned suddenly, mournfully tonal. Maccaferri quietly rejoined the group, as if to make peace, Photinos responded with a pizzicato glissando and everyone seemed happily reconciled.
Stephen Hartke's colorful "Meanwhile: Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays" (2007) was a highpoint of the concert. Eighth blackbird also performed it from memory and with their own staging. The work is divided into six parts, each incorporating elements of various types of Asian puppet theater. The opening "Celebrations" utilized an instrument called the flexatone gamelan fashioned by Hartke of three flexatones ("gamelan" refers to the percussion-rich orchestras of southeast Asia, the flexatone is a flexible metal sheet struck by wooden knobs to produce wavering pitches). Kaplan was the performer, maintaining a steady beat to accompany the other musicians.
"Fanfares" conjured a puppet and his puppeteer, with Munro on piccolo and Maccaferri on bass clarinet. Photinos strummed his cello like a guitar in "Narration," while Maccaferri on bass clarinet was the narrator stage left.
"Spikefiddlers" featured violist Albert and Photinos in a kind of Asian hoedown, with Duvall on vibraphone and puppet and puppeteer Munro and Maccaferri playing face-to-face.
"Cradle-songs" was a beauty, featuring soft harmonics by the strings, Kaplan playing with mutes on the piano strings and Duvall on "water gong" (a small Chinese gong struck, then dipped up and down in a tub of water). "Celebration" opened with Duvall shaking tiny rattles, followed by exuberant piano (unmuted), strings, flexatones (played by Munro and Maccaferri) and a fadeout roll on wood percussion.
The best known work on the program, Reich's Pulitzer Prize-winning Double Sextet, made up the second half. Joining eighth blackbird here were members of the CCM Chamber Players, a professional-level, graduate ensemble directed by Rodney Winther. Flutist Shauna Hodgson, clarinetist Jeff Carwile, violinist Nick Naegele, cellist Amy Gillingham, percussionist Erica Drake and pianist Mark Tollefsen were integrated with eighth blackbird, three players from each group performing in each sextet. The two ensembles stood facing each other vertically on the stage, with the pianos, one with its lid removed, in the back.
Co-commissioned by CCM in 2007, the work can be performed by a dozen players live or by one sextet playing against a recording of itself. The second version was performed by eighth blackbird on the final concert of "MusicX" in the Great Hall of UC's Tangeman Center in June, 2008. It was a Cincinnati premiere then, and it was a Cincinnati premiere Tuesday night in the version for 12 live musicians.
Although the Double Sextet's minimalist heritage is evident in the ostinato motion set up by the pianos and vibraphones, it defies that label through the interweaving of the instruments and by division into three, multi-part movements. The rhythms set up by the piano and vibes in the first movement had a jazzy, Bernsteinian flavor that set off the slow motion of the two sextets playing both with and against each other. The slower middle movement had an ethereal cast, as blocks of chords faded in and out, but excitement and propulsion were quickly restored as the work drew to its pulse-quickening conclusion.
With eighth blackbird a virtual ensemble-in-residence with "MusicX" in Switzerland each year, it would behoove CCM to make every effort to bring "Music X" back to Cincinnati, at least for a portion of its program.